


There's Nothing Quite Wrong (But It Don't Feel Right)

by Silent-Wordsmith (Shatteredsand)



Series: Don't Dream Too Deep [3]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alex's Party Girl Phase, Angst, Canon Compliant, Could Technically Be, Denial, Eliza Danvers A+ Parenting, F/F, Guilt, Pre-Canon, Pseudo-Incest, Repression, Sister-Sister Incest, Snapshots, The DEO | Department of Extra-Normal Operations, Underage Drinking, it's not incest if one of them is an alien
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-14
Updated: 2017-05-09
Packaged: 2018-10-05 07:44:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10301429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shatteredsand/pseuds/Silent-Wordsmith
Summary: Alex dates until she doesn’t. Kara doesn’t date until she does. Neither of them is completely happy either way.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Have some angsty plot with your sin.

Alex is only barely twenty, and her fake’s not that good. But she’s been in this bar before, and they know that the way she dances up on the girls gets both girls and their boyfriends hot, that she drinks like a sailor on his only day of shore leave in too many years, that she tips well and never causes a disturbance. So they don’t look to closely at her forgery, and they let her in, their twenty-year old money-maker.

And, honestly, with her undergrad and post grad and most of her PhD under her belt, maybe Alex should have tired of the scene. But, just as honestly, Alex deserves this. A break from endless paper and constant hours at the lab working on a thesis that she has in the bag but is endlessly stressing her out just the same. A break from moaning Kara’s name out for half-satisfactory orgasms that are still better than anyone in this club had managed to give her in the past two and a half years.

It makes her edgy, thinking about it. Makes her drink just a bit more than she usually does. Makes her grind just a bit harder against any willing body, boy or girl. She doesn’t want to think about it. She’s here to _forget_ about it.

_“Are you feeling good?” This is, perhaps, an unnecessary question, closer to something like the phone-sex they definitely aren’t having than an older sibling trying to talk their sister through their first go at masturbation. But Alex wants to know, needs to know; gods above and below damn her for it._

_“Yeah.”  Another soft sigh, barely audible but present. Alex hears it. Alex hears it, and Alex clenches on nothing, and Alex wants this to be something it’s not._

Alex does another shot. And another.

And Alex juts her hips against a pretty girl with dark hair and dark eyes—nothing like Kara—nothing like the pretty girl she’s trying to forget.

_“Now, move a hand down from there, Kara. **Slowly**.”_

_“Mft.” Kara makes a sound between a moan and a groan and, shit. Shit. Fuck. Alex can’t do this. This is wrong. This is ten times worse than thinking about Kara when she’s with nameless coeds or by herself. This is an active corruption. This is something she can’t do. She can’t, she can’t, she can’t. “ **Alex**.”_

_She can’t stop._

_“Keep going, Kara.” Alex breathes out, hoping that Kara is too distracted to notice the quality of her voice. “Slip into your panties.”_

_“I’m not, I’m not wearing any.”_

Fuck.

Fuck.

Alex shakes the memory out of her head, detaches to do another shot. The bartender gives it to her, but he also gives her a look that says he’s close to cutting her off.

_Fuck_.

She orders a water and sips at it under his watchful eye, wishing it was something harder, something to help her forget. She has another shot when she’s done, with a big—fake—smile, and he seems appeased enough to no longer be looking at her like he’s going to have to call her speed-dial to get her home.

Good.

The first person on her speed-dial is—

No. Don’t think about her, forget about her. This is unhealthy and wrong, and damn near—downright—predatory. Don’t think about her.

_“It’s good, Alex. It’s **so** **good**.” Kara says, pitchy and needy and everything Alex has ever wanted to hear from Kara but never even dared to hope for. _

_The ache between her legs is getting harder to ignore, but this isn’t about her, can’t be about her. This is about Kara. This is about helping Kara. If she touches herself, it’s another line she can’t uncross, another failure to be a good sister—hell, a good_ person _, even—and Alex has enough failures stacking up._

_“Are you wet?” Another unnecessary question. Kara sounds wet, she sounds ready. She sounds like Alex could fit two fingers in easy, maybe three._

Alex takes another shot and pretends to nurse another water while eyeing up the crowd. Dark hair and dark eyes is still there, looking back, and, well. She’s no Kryptonian goddess hiding in the guise of a sister, but she’ll do. Alex will make do.

At the end of the night, when Alex is slinking out of a stranger’s bed after saying the wrong— _right_ —name again, she pretends she can’t feel the pitying gaze of the other girl as she heads back to her dorm. She has a test in a few hours, and she hasn’t deigned to study for it, and this is her _life_.

Alex is okay with that.

She’s working on being okay with that.

OooO

Alex meets Sara at the bar. Alex, wasted off her ass, takes Sara home from the bar. And when Alex says the wrong— _right_ — name in the moment, she doesn’t feel bad about it because Sara does too.

So when, as she’s about to do the walk of shame—and she _is_ ashamed—she does nearly every night, Sara’s hand reaches out to grab her wrist, Alex hesitates.

And when Sara says, “Stay. We can be lonely together”, Alex does.

OooO

Alex is still a little drunk from the night before, still a little sore from how hard she’d managed to convince Sara to fuck her, when she gets the formal letter informing her of her academic probation. She’s not surprised, really. Another stab at her pride—another failure—but she’s kind of been expecting it.

She’s spent more of this semester in a fog of intoxication and never truly satisfied lust than she has even attempting to study. Her thesis is a mess of fragmented thoughts and half-formulated equations that don’t make sense. Her attendance has dropped drastically, too. Too many mornings too hungover to crawl out of her bed and make herself presentable for class. Too many late nights trying to go over the material in her textbooks after crawling home from a bed that isn’t hers, the letters swimming before her drunken eyes.

Alex is supposed to be in class, but she’s in no condition to subject herself to complicated sciences right now, and there’s no real point in it, is there? Academic probation, the prelude to her expulsion. Inevitable.

She calls Sara instead. They haven’t progressed beyond plastered booty calls after ten pm yet, but, well. Fuck it. If her life is going to go down in flames, Alex will at least make sure that _everything_ burns at the same time.

“Alex? Is a morning sex call? Because after the things we did last night—some of which I was pretty sure weren’t physically possible by the way, thank you for proving me wrong—I absolutely cannot get out of this bed.”

“Then I’ll come to you. Coffee?”

A stretched out moment of silence. This is new, this is different, this isn’t what they do. Then, “Yeah. Alright.”

OooO

Hanging out with Sara, when not actively fucking her brains out, is nice. Hanging out when she _is_ actively fucking her is better, but the not fucking is nice too.

Sara’s pre-med, too, though without the coinciding PhD struggle, so they can get together and bitch about classes, professors, homework. They can sit and mindlessly binge on the endless tv reruns while they study until they stop studying and start drinking and then the not fucking part of the evening transitions into the fucking part.

They don’t really _talk_ though. That’s good, too. Alex doesn’t want someone she can tell things to. She doesn’t want to go over to Sara’s, or have Sara come over to hers, and spend that time telling her how Eliza doesn’t understand her, doesn’t even really seem to want her now that she has her new perfect daughter who can touch the stars. She doesn’t want to tell Sara about how she got a new foster sister when she was fifteen and seemed to suddenly disappear in her parents eyes, became an extension of Kara, someone to look after her when they couldn’t, someone to help take care of her, to protect her. She doesn’t want to talk about how she understands it, the way Kara crash landed into their lives and took them over so completely; she took over Alex’s too.

She doesn’t want to talk about the sister she never wanted, or how she doesn’t feel like a sister, can’t make herself look at her like a sister, doesn’t want to even say her name to Sara.

That would give the game away, after all, and this is the nicest thing Alex has been allowed to have for herself since she was fifteen.

She doesn’t want  the game to be over yet.

OooO

She tells her mother she has a girlfriend mostly to shut her up halfway through Eliza’s list of Kara’s endless accomplishments that month—because Alex had been convincing when she said that she was too busy for weekly calls, they’d have to do monthly; not that Eliza had offered more than a half-hearted token argument—and she remembers, belatedly, that she had never actually gotten around to coming out to her mother. Or anyone, actually. Alex isn’t even sure if she’d told Kara, and she tells Kara _everything_.

“Oh.” Eliza says, caught off guard. And Alex braces for the backlash, the list of all the ways this doesn’t line up with the grand plan of _be normal, protect Kara_. Sara sees the tension tighten in her spine and slips a hand into hers. They’re not much more than bene-friends, really. They talk sometimes, and they fuck most nights, but neither has managed to bring themselves to say the name of the person they’re actually with when they come and neither of them has any illusions about exactly what this is. It’s nice, though. It’s good.

It means that Alex doesn’t have to get blitzed at the bar—Sara’s twenty-one, and she has no problems with supplying her underaged friend—and try and find somebody new to home at night—Sara is always down to bang, always down to forget whoever the fuck Nyssa is; Alex doesn’t ask, and Sara doesn’t ask about Kara, and that’s how they _work_ —and Alex’s grades are back up this semester, even  if she’s still on academic probation and even if they’re still not good enough to matter against Kara’s “perfectly human A and B report, you’d never know that she’s from a highly advanced species; it must be so boring for her”.

It’s good.

“You should bring her to Thanksgiving.” Eliza says, disappointment—for _once_ —absent in her tone.

 “I’ll.” Alex hesitates. She hadn’t discussed her plans for the break with Sara, they don’t talk about personal shit. “I’ll ask her.”

She says it like Sara isn’t right there, holding her hand, looking at her with curious eyes. She doesn’t know much, and she knows that she’s not really Alex’s girlfriend—the same way Alex isn’t really hers—but she also knows Alex isn’t currently seeing anyone else. She knows Alex had been talking about her when she’d blurted out that she was “seeing someone and she’s really great and isn’t that great, Mom?”.

“Yeah, yeah, I love you, too.” Alex says, more an exasperated sigh than actual speech, and hangs up.

“All good, babe?”

“Yeah. Yeah.” Alex breathes in deep, exhales slowly. Won’t open her eyes. “I know we don’t do this, but what are your plans for Thanksgiving?”

Sara’s plans for Thanksgiving include going home to Star City, listening to her parents exude praise for her older sister while she pretends not to be resentful that Laurel had made it a point to snag Sara’s crush out from under her, and trying not to get blatantly drunk under the watchful eyes of her father, the cop.

Alex invites her to Midvale, because she told her mother she would, because she understands the weight of being the imperfect sibling in the family, because maybe it’ll be better if Sara is there.

Sara accepts. And Alex doesn’t even think about the fact that bringing Sara home means introducing her to Kara.

Kara, aka the girl she’s so obviously thinking about every time Sara’s fingers slip against, into, her. The girl she moans—screams—for when she comes under Sara’s careful ministrations.

Alex forgets about that for five seconds, and everything goes straight to hell.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

Alex suddenly remembers the name the she’s –gasped, moaned, screamed— _said_ every time she’s come with Sara above her, under her, inside her, every time she’s had an orgasm since Kara had called her wanting help with her own needs and Alex had talked her through it, over a year ago. She remembers, with a wave of nausea and _wrong_ , that she’s about to introduce the girl she’s been fucking to the girl whose name she always calls out. The right— _wrong_ —name she always utters when Sara is inside her.

She remembers as she’s walking up to the front door of her childhood home.

Alex only has a moment to appreciate how deeply and truly fucked she is before Kara is at the door, before Alex could knock, ring the bell, use her own keys to let herself in.

Kara. Beautiful, radiant Kara. Her sunshine kissed skin—sunshine kissed with inhuman strength and speed and some many other abilities—and her out of this world blue eyes that Alex sees every time she topples over the edge into pleasure. Her sunshine blonde hair, waves of it, all tied up into a tight ponytail that Alex could work out with her fingers, nails grazing against soft Kryptonian skin as Kara mewled in pleasure.

The girl—nearly a woman now—that Alex has been trying not to be in love with since she was sixteen years old and has been failing to get over for just as long. Another failure in a long list that she’s sure her mother could, and would, whip out with the slightest provocation. A list of failures that doesn’t feature Alex’s inability to treat Kara as a sister—the only failure that doesn’t make the list—because that’s the only failure Alex has managed to hide from her mother.

“Alex!” Kara cries, throwing herself at her sister—because Alex is her _sister_ , they’re just sisters, that’s all they can be, that’s all Kara _wants_ them to be—and pulling her into an embrace just a shade too tight to be comfortable, to be human. Alex ignores the flicker of want at her foster sister’s strength as it encompasses her, popping the joints in her spine and shoulders. Bites back a moan as she feels Kara’s overenthusiastic hands brand bruises into her shoulder blades and the small of her back. 

It’s just _Kara_ , an alien still trying to come to grasps with her inhuman abilities, happy to see her sister. It’s not anything more than that, and Alex needs to get a godsdamned hold of herself.

“Hey, sis.” It burns at the back of her throat, _sis_ , like that’s what they are to each other. When Alex can remember with painfully perfect clarity exactly how Kara sounds when she comes, when she wishes she could _forget_.

They’re not sisters, no matter how hard Alex tries to pretend. No matter how hard Kara wishes, wants, needs. Alex does her best, because Kara deserves nothing less, but she can’t make it true just to appease Kara, to appease her mother. She’s tried and she’s tried, over and over again, and the results are always the same.

Kara is not Alex’s sister.

The feelings Alex has aren’t sisterly, cannot even be vaguely labeled “sisterly”. Alex has come to the image of Kara between her legs too often for that. Alex has remembered Kara moan “ _Alex_ ” in the throes of her pleasure too often for that. Alex has been tortured by that memory far too often to pretend that the affection, the love, she has for Kara could be familial.

“You were gone _so_ _long_ ; I’ve missed you!” Kara says, still wrapped around Alex, her lips brushing against Alex’s neck, breath rushing over oversensitive skin. Alex fights back a shudder, a blatant revelation of how good it feels to have Kara in her arms, to feel Kara pressed so closely against her. She’s had this before, has known how good it feels. But if feels different, several months and too many repressed feelings between then and now, and Alex cannot help but sink into the embrace. To luxuriate in the feeling of being held by Kara, in the feeling wrapping her arms around Kara and feeling her foster sister sink into that feeling of being held.

“I missed you, too.” Alex sighs, wondering how long she can manage to avoid Kara’s name before Sara hears it, until Sara puts the pieces together, until it all comes crashing down. There’s a difference between pining after some girl who broke your heart and pining after a girl who’s supposed to be your sister, and it’s a difference Alex is painfully aware of.

She doesn’t doubt that whatever she and Sara are will be to be over as soon as somebody mentions Kara by name.

“Kara, let your sister breathe.” Eliza admonishes gently, and Kara lets go with a sheepish smile and a hint of red in her cheeks. Even without the loving Kryptonian stranglehold, Alex still can’t breathe. Because there it is, someone said it. And Sara is giving her the world’s sharpest look, a thousand pointed questions in her gaze and all of them ready to cut Alex to the quick.

“Hi, Mom.” Alex says, trying not to look at Sara right now. Trying to will herself back in time to before she had asked Sara to Thanksgiving, before she had agreed to stay and be lonely with Sara, before she had picked Sara up at the bar, before she’d agreed to talk Kara through the human ritual of masturbation, before she had fallen in love with her foster sister.

“Alexandra, you look too thin, you aren’t eating enough.” Eliza frowns, looking her up and down and, as always, finding her _wanting_. Alex almost makes a quip about being an all liquid diet, but her mother isn’t stupid—her mother is Doctor Eliza Marie Danvers, PhD, biochemist and university lecturer, author of some of the foremost articles in the best scientific journals in the world—she’d pick up on the implication. And even though it would be true, would be deserved, Alex doesn’t want to face the repercussions for _that_ particular failing of hers. “And where are your manners? You haven’t introduced your lovely girlfriend yet.” She tuts, shaking her head ruefully. “I swear I raised her better than this.”

Sara smiles, looking just about as strained as Alex feels. “Sara Lance, ma’am, it’s nice to meet you.”

“Girlfriend?” Kara questions, eyes darting back and forth between the two of them. So, yeah, Alex definitely accidentally-on-purpose forgot to mention the gay thing to her. Or the Sara thing. Shit. “Oh.”

Alex’s stomach twists and her heart drops—or maybe stops, she isn’t sure—because Kara looks like a kicked puppy. Kara looks like a kicked puppy, and Alex did that, even if she’s not sure what she’s done to put that look on her foster sister’s face.

“That would be me!” Sara chirps, like she doesn’t know that the thought of Kara is the only thing that can get Alex off. “And you must be the sister, heard a lot about you.”

That’s a lie. Alex isn’t even sure she’d told Sara she had a sister. Because what if Sara wanted to talk about that? What if Sara asked her _name_?

“Well, we’ve heard nothing about you. Alexandra can be so tight lipped.” It’s a pointed comment, and Alex can feel the barb sinking into the soft skin beside her ribs and jabbing straight through to her heart. She should have told her mom about being a lesbian. She should have told her about meeting someone. She’d disappointed, again.

“Sorry.”

“Girlfriend, though.” Kara says, voice just a touch off, accent almost seeping into the words. “I didn’t know hu— _people_ could do that.”

Oh fuck. She’s going to have to explain homosexuality to Kara. Kara, whose people weren’t born but _designed_. Kara, who didn’t know what masturbation was until Alex told her. Kara, who has never been on a date. Kara, who once came moaning Alex’s name.

“Is that going to be a problem?” Sara asks, something hard in her voice, in her eyes.

Alex reaches out, puts a hand on Sara’s elbow, silently wills her not-girlfriend to calm down. “It’s not like that. She doesn’t understand.”

Alex gets where Sara is coming from. Kara is seventeen, almost eighteen, about to graduate high school; she should know this stuff. She would, if she was human. But Kara isn’t human. Kara is _alien_ and she spends her free time fervently reading encyclopedias and watching documentaries, trying to make sense of this world she’s found herself lost on. Kara doesn’t have friends. The teasing and outright bullying has stopped since Kara learned how to better blend in, since Alex had started kicking any and all asses that said so much as word against or about her, but no one is willing to be the one who reaches out and welcomes her into their lives, too much aware of the social stigma Kara still carries, no matter how hard she tries to fade into the background.

“Doesn’t understand lesbians?” Sara is incredulous. “It’s pretty simple, isn’t it?”

“ _Stop_.” And there’s bite in her tone, bite that Alex has never used with Sara. Sara is always so good about avoiding anything sensitive with Alex; they aren’t that kind of friends. They joke and they drink and they fuck, but serious shit has always been off the table.

Sara scoffs, and Sara rolls her eyes, and Alex doesn’t know what to say.

Kara’s looking like a kicked puppy again, and Alex hates it but she can’t fix it. “Sorry. All your… _American_ media, everything I’ve seen and read, I hadn’t seen…it was different on…where I’m _from_. I just. I didn’t know people did it here, too.”

Alex stares, and Alex gapes, and, holy shit, Kryptonians apparently weren’t the heterosexual, patriarchal society of self-righteous jackoffs Superman had led them to believe.

“Kara is adopted.” Eliza says in the silence, smoothing over the gaps with a look at Alex that tells her she should have briefed Sara on this already, that this is all Alex’s fault, that she should have done more, done _better_. “Sometimes, there are little miscommunications.”

“Oh.” Sara grimaces, and Sara blushes, and Sara bites her lip. “Sorry. It’s just, ya know, a sensitive topic.”

“I did not mean to offend.” Kara murmurs, reverting back to the overly formal English that she’d first learned to use before Alex taught her slang and contractions and the way teenagers talk. She’s mostly trained out that habit, but stress— _nerves_ —still brings it back full-force. “I apologize most sincerely, Sara Lance.”

“It’s, it’s fine, Kara.” Sara smiles, and Alex makes the mistake of relaxing. “Alex talks about her sister so much, it never occurred to me that you weren’t _always_ a Danvers.”

Kara wilts and Alex flinches and everyone else in the room pretends not to notice. _Alex_ pretends not to notice. Because why wouldn’t Kara want Alex to talk about her like her little sister? Why wouldn’t this be great news for her? There’s the glimmer of hope there that Kara feels the same way that Alex does, and that’s the definition of dangerous. That’s something Alex cannot allow herself to consider. Kara is supposed to be her sister, Kara sees her as a sister, Kara loves her as a sister. That’s what they are, that’s what they’re _supposed_ to be.

And, of course, Sara knows that no part of Alex sees Kara as a sister, that Alex comes undone, comes apart, just fucking _comes_ moaning Kara’s name. But here they are, in Alex’s childhood home. Here they are, playing the same game Alex has been playing since she was sixteen, hoping no one notices that what she says and what she feels are in no way aligned.

Fuck.

OooO

When Sara gives her a look that all but screams that they’re going to talk about this, Alex is quick to usher her out the door.

“I’m gonna show Sara the beach!” Alex calls out, lightly pushing her not!girlfriend towards the door.

“Be back before dinner!” Eliza demands.

Alex shouts back her acknowledgement before closing the door eagerly and all but dragging Sara away from the house.

“I know you want to yell at me, probably, but not here. Kara has the ears of a fucking bat.” She whispers harshly as she tugs, and Sara seems to settle into waiting until Alex deems them far enough away.

The sound of the crashing waves and scent of salt water and the gritty traction of sand under her feet are all familiar and comforting. Alex thinks she’s likely to need a bit of comfort if she’s going to survive this conversation.

“Your sister.” Sara starts, incredulous. “Your _sister_.”

Alex flinches like Sara had out and out sucker punched her in the face. “She’s _not_ my sister.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I must have misunderstood that part where your family adopted her.”

“She’s not adopted, either.” Alex clears her throat awkwardly, wondering if it might not be better for everyone if she just started walking until the waves swallowed her whole. “Not formally. My mom fosters her.”

“Your foster sister then.” Sara grouses, rolling her eyes.

“I know, okay!” Alex doesn’t mean to yell. She’s the one in the wrong here, she knows that. She’s the one with feelings she should have, the one who can’t do what’s expected of her, the one who stupidly invited her fuckbuddy home to meet her family. “I’m _fucked_ _up_ , what do you want from me?”

“A few fucking answers to start!” Sara yells back. Normally, Alex would bristle, fight back, it’s not in her to take anything lying down, but. She is the one in the wrong. She’s the one that fucked up. She’s the one who caused all this. It’s all her fault, all her fault, all her fault.

“What do you want to hear?” Alex’s voice is weak, even in her own ears. “That I didn’t even meet Kara until I was fifteen? That I hated her at first? That I was cruel to her after she’d just lost _everything_? That I don’t want to feel like this? I don’t! I _hate_ it! I wish I could hate her again, because at least then I wouldn’t have to hate _myself_!”

Sara stares at her, forces Alex to meet her eyes, refuses to let her look away. “Holy shit, you’re in love with her.”

“I’m not allowed to be.” Alex chokes out pathetically, ignoring the shake in her words, the tremble in her hands, the quake in her spine. “It’s _wrong_.”

“Maybe.” Sara shrugs. Alex wonders when the hell her chill friend who gives her orgasms came back and the righteously outraged woman from before disappeared. She’s forgotten how quickly Sara could ramp up to a hundred, and just as instantly simmer down. It’s a level of emotional whiplash Alex isn’t really used to, they’re not close, and damn if it’s not throwing her through the ringer now.“But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

“It’s not.” Alex denies because she hates to. She doesn’t accept this. It’s not true, it isn’t real. It’s just some weird quirk of hers where the only name she can say during sex is ‘Kara’. It’s a sex thing, that’s all. Because, Alex is really fucking gay and she has functional eyes and Kara is absolutely, breathtakingly gorgeous. That’s all it is, that’s all it can be. She’s not in love, she’s isn’t.

She isn’t allowed to be.

“And I’m a bottle blonde.” Sara deadpans. “Look, you were a teenager and another, seriously hot, teenager came into your life. It’s not that bad.”

Alex glares that someone else calling Kara “seriously hot” because Kara is sunshine too pure for this mortal coil.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that.” Sara rolls her eyes again. “She’s fucking gorgeous and you know it, _obviously_. My point is, it’s not super weird or wrong for a teenager to fall in love with another rando teenager.”

“She’s not a rando, Sara, she’s my _foster sister_.”

“And that’s a little weird, but, like, not super much. It’s not like you have a foot fetish.”

“No. I have a ‘can only have an orgasm when imaging my baby foster sister’ fetish. Explain how that’s better?”

“Okay, maybe don’t specify ‘baby’ cause then you sound like a pedo. And that’s not a fetish, it’s a sickness.”

“Fuck you, Lance.”

“Not on the beach. I’m still getting sand out of places it has no right to be from the last, and only, time I did that.”

“Sara.”

“Look, we don’t have to talk about it, okay?” Sara slings an arm over Alex’s shoulders. “It’s not like I’m in this for anything more than your hot bod and ridiculous sex drive. You’ve never been with me when I was fucking you, I haven’t been with you either, this is just. This is just another part of that.”

Alex says yeah, and Alex says okay, and Alex pretends like this doesn’t change anything, doesn’t change everything.

And they walk back to the house and sit down for dinner and it’s okay.

It’s going to be okay.

OooO

Kara is oddly withdrawn during the break. Not rudely, so. Barely even _noticeably_ so. Eliza certainly doesn’t notice, and neither does Sara. But Alex. Alex has spent the past five years being obsessively in-tune with Kara. For Kara’s safety and protection, for Alex’s own need to just watch her and know she’s okay.

Alex pays Kara more attention than she should—she nearly always has—and so she notices.

Kara is oddly withdrawn and, at once, both more and less tactile than she usually is. Her hugs are less frequent, but last longer. She doesn’t cuddle up with Alex on the couch when they all watch tv, but she doesn’t go more than five steps anywhere with Alex without reaching out and lacing their fingers together. Every touch, no matter how fleeting, leaves a light bruise, barely there at all, from Kara’s preternatural strength against Alex’s all too human flesh. Finger-paintings of possession all over Alex’s pale skin canvas.

Not that Alex lets herself think that Kara thinks of it like that. She probably doesn’t. She’s probably just too excited at having Alex home again, excited to spend time with her _sister_.

It’s strange. It’s almost, but not quite, uncomfortable. The too close, not close enough distance rippling between them like crashing waves against the beach.

Alex doesn’t know what to make of it, really, so she pushes the thoughts away and pretends not to notice. She’s very good at pretending not to notice Kara, after all. She focuses on Sara, instead.

Sara who gives her the occasional knowing look, but doesn’t ask a single question or make even one pointed comment after their blowout on the beach. Alex is infinitely grateful for that because Alex never wants Kara to know, and if Sara starts asking questions, Kara is bound to overhear.

The long weekend is the longest Alex and Sara have gone without sleeping together in the not strictly literal sense, but Sara doesn’t ask about that either and doesn’t push. If she had asked, Alex would have said she didn’t want to fuck around in her mom’s house—which, to be fair, is not a complete lie—but the whole truth would have been that Alex didn’t want to think about Kara being able to hear her having sex.

Didn’t want Kara to be able to hear whose name Alex would say.

Alex is pretty sure Sara doesn’t ask because Sara already fucking _knows_.

OooO

Sara doesn’t last long after Thanksgiving. She never talks about how Alex is hopelessly hung-up on her foster sister, never even mentions Kara at all. Even though Alex still says—moans, screams—her name every time Sara makes her come.

But Alex knows. Alex knows what Sara knows every time they’re lost in the moment. Knows that Sara knows she’s screaming for someone who should be her sister as she quivers, as she clenches, as she comes. Alex knows that Sara knows about her shame, and Alex can’t keep it up for more than a week and a half after that.

They “break-up”, as much as two people who were never truly invested in one another can, a week before Christmas. Alex apologizes, says this relationship isn’t working—it almost is, though, almost could if Sara didn’t know exactly who Alex screams for when she comes, if either of them could be ignorant to Alex’s sexual and romantic twists—and they can still be friends, maybe, but they can’t be _this_.

Because Alex can’t—gasp, moan, scream—say Kara’s name when Sara is inside her, not when she knows Sara knows exactly whose name she’s crying out, not when she knows that Sara knows exactly who she’s thinking about.

The shame is too much. Here’s a difference between crying out for some ex-lover who broke your heart and screaming out for some girl who hadn’t, who owned your heart, who _was_ your heart even when she didn’t know it and could never be told. The difference is stark and real and omnipresent and Alex can’t move past it to move on with Sara.

Neither of them where ever really invested in this relationship, anyways. It was easy booze and easy orgasms and a sense of easy comradery.  This was never anything _real_ , and they both knew it.

There was no shame in ending it, no shame in being the one to call it out for what it was. They were friends. They were friends who fucked. And they couldn’t even fuck anymore without Alex feeling like an exposed wire, stripped bare and likely to electrocute anyone who dared to touch.

They could still be friends, both were adamant, but they couldn’t be what they were. Because Sara knew Kara was supposed to Alex’s kid sister even as Alex moaned and screamed and came.

 


	3. Chapter 3

Alex is at the bar again, and Alex is drunk again, and Alex just wants to go home because, honestly, nobody here is doing it for her right now. None of them are bubbly blonde rays of sunshine from another planet. None of them are even passable facsimiles. None of them are what she _wants_. And Alex is tired of going home with woman who are everything she’s not looking for so she can pretend she isn’t looking for exactly what she is.

Alex drops her keys and there’s a tale-tell flashing of red and blue and an ominous _whoop_ - _whoop_. And, well.

Fuck.

OooO

Alex has never been arrested before. She’s not even sure she deserves to be arrested now. She had her keys, yeah, but she wasn’t actually going to _drive_. She’s drunk, not dumb. But she hadn’t wanted to go home with anyone there and she wasn’t going to get in a cab—a pretty girl, drunk and alone; she’s _not_ _dumb_ —so sleeping it off in her car seemed like the best solution. And, okay, sure, she’s underage, but that’s more of a call an angry parent offense, in Alex’s books, not a spend the night in the drunk tank while we process you for drunk and disorderly.

She hadn’t even been disorderly! She’d been very calm and reasonable in her relocation to her car.

Bastards.

Though, if it means not having to deal with an Eliza Lecture, maybe it’ll be worth it. It’s probably just a fine or something. Alex will pay it and Eliza will be none the wiser, and this is going to be fine.

“Your father would damned ashamed if he saw you like this.”

Alex rolls her eyes, too used to ignoring the constant ache of missing her dad to let some careless comment from some overly-involved cop get to her. “Not really in the mood for the afterschool special, officer.”

“It’s Director, actually.”

Alex can’t help but snort. She hopes this is what she thinks it is, some twelve steps counselor here to try and “save” her; she could use the laugh. If this guy thinks _this_ is her rock bottom, he’s got another thing coming. Rock bottom was over a year ago, listening to Kara gasp and moan and come for her, and she hasn’t been worth saving in half a decade, if she ever was.

“And I knew Jeremiah Danvers.” The man adds, and Alex’s heart stops beating. “It’d break his heart to see his precious Alex languishing like this. Flunking out of her PhD with just over a year to go. Drinking herself to death in sketchy bars and clubs. Crawling into a different bed every other day, recklessly. Unsafe.”

“Shut the fuck up.” Alex doesn’t talk about her dad, not with anyone. Certainly not with random jackasses in police stations, coming down to judge her in her father’s name.

“Your father saved my life once, and I promised a dying man I’d look out for his daughters. I don’t like breaking promises.”

A dying man? Had this guy been on that final flight with her father? Is that how he “knew” Jeremiah?

“So, you have a choice. You can sit in this cell tonight, pay your fine in the morning, and go back to wasting your life away trying to bury the pain. Or, you can get up right now and come work for me.”

It seems a little fairy-godmother to be real, to be believable. But, then, Alex also asked for a puppy one year and got an alien the next, so. Who the fuck is she to decide what counts as believable?

Alex stands up, careful not to wobble on unsteady legs and shaky knees. She doesn’t know if this is the right decision, if she’s capable of even _recognizing_ a right decision anymore, but, at this point, fuck it. Fuck it all. It’s not like what she’s currently doing is actually working either.

“Welcome to the DEO, _Agent_ Danvers.

OooO

Training at the DEO is…rigorous. She spends twelve hours a day getting her ass thoroughly handed to her by Director Henshaw, and then spends another six completing the work necessary for her degrees. Her day rounds out with four quick shots of something hard and burning before collapsing into bed to sleep for as many hours as she can before the whole thing starts all over again.

It’s grueling. Punishing in a way that none of her benders, and subsequent hangovers, had ever been. As a secondary penalty—something, somehow more painful than the hours of being beaten black and blue by her new boss—Alex has basically no time to talk to Kara. Their relationship, once the definition of _close_ , has been reduced to a few, fleeting text messages at meal times or for five minute study breaks.

More than just missing her, it hurts Alex because she can feel Kara’s confusion, Kara’s hurt, Kara’s abandonment. And Alex can’t even tell her _why_.

The DEO doesn’t officially exist, and Alex’s participation is as highly classified as the department itself. Now, Alex has two secrets from someone she once thought she’d share everything with. Selfish secrets, building walls between them. Even her first secret, her sick feelings, hadn’t managed to do that. But this one does, because Kara is reaching out to her, and, sometimes—oftentimes, _most_ times—Alex isn’t there anymore. Missed calls, text messages answered hours after they’d been sent. Monosyllabic responses when Alex does respond because she’s just so damn _tired_ all the time.

She used to always have time for Kara, always had energy to help her alien through anything and everything, from confusing human rituals to how cute cat videos can be. Now, Alex barely has enough energy to let her foster sister know that she hasn’t fallen off the face of the planet and died.

It’s _hard_.

OooO

 _Brad asked me to the prom, should I say yes?_ ~~Sunshine Puppy, 12:28

 _Alex? What should I do???_ ~~Sunshine Puppy, 12:35

 _ALEX_ ~~Sunshine Puppy, 12:43

Missed Call: Sunshine Puppy, 13:10

 _I said yes_.~~Sunshine Puppy, 13:26

Alex doesn’t have a chance to read the messages until almost ten pm, but once she does…

Alex swallows thickly and tries to make herself be happy for her foster sister. This is a big deal. This is an olive branch towards normal that Kara has been trying so hard to be gifted with. This is a normal guy—not her should be _sister_ —acknowledging that Kara is beautiful, worth knowing, worth loving. This is everything Alex should want for Kara.

It makes her throw up the four shots of Jack into the toilet of her dorm instead.

She takes another seven when she gets back to her bunk.

OooO

 _That’s GREAT! Make sure my mom takes ALL the pictures, I need photographic evidence of my baby sister growing up and getting a date. Is he your *boyfriend* now?_ ~~Al-Ex of House Dan-Vers, 22:43

OooO

After graduation, it’s…easier. Still hard, still occasionally grueling, but it’s not eighteen hours of _nonstop_ anymore. Alex has more time to talk to Kara, to lie to her family about what she’s doing. According to them, she’s a lab monkey right now, just getting her foot in the door, but with a lot of potential for advancement. Eliza smiles like she’d expected more—Alex isn’t surprised; she has an MD and a PhD, there are a lot more ambitious positions she could have taken if she wasn’t, you know, lying about the position in the first place—but Kara is genuinely thrilled for her, jumping up and down and clapping her hands like a little kid. It’s painfully cute.

Alex is out on her first op two weeks later, finds a rush in combat that’s almost like the worst of her binge-drinking days. She goes home, a little battered, a little bruised, and she only has one, celebratory, shot before spending the rest of the night talking to Kara about her college experience and Alex’s “first breakthrough at the lab”.

It’s probably the best day of her life.

OooO

Missed call: Sunshine Puppy, 20:22

Missed Call: Sunshine Puppy , 20:24

Missed Call: Sunshine Puppy, 20:26

Voicemail~~Sunshine Puppy, 20:40: ALEX! I did it. I had _sex_!! And I didn’t hurt him! It was totally normal. I mean, it was awkward, and a little weird, and I didn’t…you know…but I did it! I can have sex!! ALEX!!

OooO

Alex throws up three shots of Jack, two beers, and every good feeling she’d had about that day’s op.

Gods, she should be better than this. Better than being sick over her foster sister—her _little_ _sister_ —finally getting to have sex, and finally getting that little piece of normalcy. Fuck, Kara is in college; she’s supposed to sleep with people. She’s supposed to experiment and find herself. And Alex is the worst kind of hypocrite because she had slept with innumerable people before the _whoop_ - _whoop_ and Hank Henshaw and the DEO.

But it still makes her sick to think about Kara sleeping with people—with anyone who isn’t _her_ —and the idea that Kara didn’t come while whatever fuckboy she’d taken to did makes her twice as mad. Kara deserves all the best things, orgasms included.

But Kara talks about Matt like he’s a good guy—shitty sex not withstanding—and Kara talks about Matt like he matters, and Alex breathes like she’s meditating, like the fact that someone else is touching Kara doesn’t make her want to shoot everyone who’s ever even thought about touching the alien. _Alex’s_ alien.

Alex learns to be supportive. Alex learns to adapt.

And if she has Matt— _slightly_ illegally—detained for the duration of his summer break after he breaks up with Kara, when he breaks her heart for the first time, well, no one can prove that he _wasn’t_ colluding with hostile aliens at the time, even if they couldn’t prove he _was_ either. Being a high ranking member of a clandestine government institution has to have some perks, after all.

And if Hank smiles at her likes he knows, like he _approves_ , well. No one but the two of them knows that for sure.

OooO

Time slips past Alex in a slew of missed texts and absentminded phone calls. Kara is as beautifully energetic as always, always something newly discovered for the alien to ramble about while Alex hems and hums and soaks in the sounds of her happiness. The perfect counterpoint to calls with Eliza where Alex finds herself constantly on alert, ready to go on the defensive at the slightest change in Eliza’s tone or pointed word choice.

There are fleeting mentions of boys and girls that Kara has attracted into her orbit—a beautiful alien sun, pulling all lesser mortals to her without intent or even realization—some as friends, a few as were-friends-but-now-are-boy/girlfriends. Nothing really sticks, though, and Alex hates how relieved it makes her. Tells herself that she’s just happy that Kara is getting the full college experience and not getting her heart too entangled with a romance that’s not likely to last.

Until Kara is in her junior year and Alex is less a high ranking member of government jackboots and more like _the_ high ranking member, someone people take orders from without question, someone who doesn’t take orders from anyone but Hank these days.

 Then Kara calls because there’s someone new.

“She’s so pretty, Alex.” Kara sighs. “And her _paintings_. I could get lost in her art for hours.”

This means more coming from Kara than most would understand. Everyone sees Superman speeding about, faster than the eye can see, and no one realizes that that doesn’t have an off switch, not really. Time is different for Kryptonians. It slows down and speeds up and warps around them in defiance of humanity’s understanding of it.

Hours for Kara could feel like days or weeks.

“Oh?” Alex hopes she sounds interested, happy for her, and not as uncomfortable and vaguely nauseous as she actually is. She’s over this. She’s _been_ over this. Seven years is far too long to hold a torch for anyone, let alone a supposed-to-be sibling.

Alex doesn’t think about Kara like that anymore. She _doesn’t_.

“I don’t know if she likes girls, though.” Kara whines, and Alex can hear the muffled sound of Kara flopping onto her back with a huff. “How am I supposed to be able to tell?”

“ _You_ can’t.” Alex jokes, “Your gaydar is for shit, Kar.”

“Is that a thing?!” Kara sounds almost panicked now. “Something humans can do?”

“Oh my gods, Kara, _no_.” Alex can’t help but laugh a bit. “It’s an expression.”

“Alex.” Alex can’t see the pout, but she can hear it. “Don’t be mean to me.”

“Just ask her out, Kara. Worst case” Best case “scenario, she says no. It’ll be okay.”

“But what if she says yes?”

“Then you go on a date with a pretty girl?” Alex’s tongue feels too thick in her mouth, trying to force joviality into her words.

“I’m not good at dating.”

“You’re great at dating. Matt was a jackass.”

“Matt was sweet, Alex.”

“You were with him for a year and you didn’t come once. Ergo, j _ackass_.”

“That’s not his fault, Alex.” Kara sighs. “I don’t think I can, really.”

“You can; you have.” Which is far too close to mentioning The Phone Call Alex Does Not Think About for comfort.

“Not with anyone else.” Kara sighs, dejected, and Alex’s heart hurts. “Humans are just so…fragile.”

“Ask the pretty girl out, Kar.” Alex doesn’t want Kara to date again, but can’t stand to hear her alien so damned sad either. She picks her poison, makes her bed, and lies in it. “You’ll figure it out, you always do.”

“You’ll help?” Kara sounds so small. Alex hates it. Kara is a beam of sunshine, larger than life in her smile and her sweet kindness; she should never be made to feel small.

“Of course.” Alex swallows the lump in her throat, twists her lips into a smile so Kara will be able to hear it around her words. “Always.”

OooO

The pretty girl last for all of two months before deciding that no, she’s not really into girls. Alex doesn’t have her absconded with by a paramilitary organization in the dead of the night, but only because Kara doesn’t sound heartbroken. Kara doesn’t even sound that sad, really.

“She was pretty, and I loved her art, and we’re good friends.” Kara had informed Alex with a distinct lack of sorrow. “We weren’t good girlfriends.”

Alex does put her name on the DEO’s watchlist though. It’ll _probably_ have no lasting consequences on the life of one Felicity Smoak. Well, she’ll be “randomly” selected by the TSA every time she tries to board a plane, but other _that_ …

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

Kara has a date. Kara has signed up for some inane online dating site, and Kara has a date. Alex should be used to it by now.

NCU was far away from Midvale, from the kids who had seen Kara as a twig of a girl who stared at birds like she’d never seen one before and spent the first week of school, every year, jumping and flinching at the bell. Kara had dated on and off through her years there. Never anyone who lasted too long, never anyone Kara had particularly gushed about—though, the first time Kara had successfully come with a human partner had warranted an hour long dish session that Alex had immediately tried to blackout with a truly ungodly amount of whiskey—but she’d stopped for over a year after she got her job at Catco.

Alex had, selfishly, horribly, hoped that Kara had given up. That Alex wouldn’t have to worry about sharing her again. Clearly, she was even more delusional than she’d known. Because Kara has a date. Some guy some stupid computer algorithm had decided she was eighty-two percent compatible with, as if there could be any hope of accurate results when so much of the input data is half-fabricated and half-redacted.

Not that Alex is upset about it. She’s not. She’s put those feelings behind her. She’s taught herself to see Kara exactly the way she’s supposed to, her perfect little alien foster sister.

Absolutely, that. The way it should be.

Alex hasn’t dated since Sara, if Sara even _counted_ , and Alex hasn’t hooked up since the drunk tank Hank had fished her out of, and Alex has a plane to catch. But Kara had called her, had asked her over, had needed her help. Even if it was just over what outfit she should wear on some stupid date with some stupid guy, Alex didn’t have it in her to deny her foster sister anything.

She loves her too much for that.

So Alex goes over. Alex goes over and gives her a pep talk and picks out a nice blue blouse and sends Kara on her way before rushing to catch her flight.

Everything, unsurprisingly, goes directly to hell from there.

OooO

The pilot is speaking over the intercom, but Alex isn’t listening. Alex is too busy praying.

_“Please, Kara, no. I love you. Don’t do it. Enjoy your date. Ignore the news. Don’t you fucking dare and save this plane. Don’t you even think of exposing yourself for me. Please, Kara, don’t.”_

Kara saves the plane, of course.

Alex looks out at her foster sister on the wing of the plane she just saved, the plane she just saved for _Alex’s_ sake, and Alex cannot help but smile. Cannot help but be proud of her foster sister and her strength and her bravery and her devotion. Cannot help but love her more.

When Alex storms into Kara’s apartment, after the fact, she keeps that pride and that love far from her tone. Protecting Kara is the most important thing Alex has ever done, will ever do, and this spat in the face of that. For _Alex’s_ sake. It’s not okay.

The glass of whiskey—the bottle Kara only has for her, because she knows Alex likes to drink but doesn’t understand _how_ _much_ —rolls in her mouth and flows down her throat, and it’s not enough to make this easier like it should. Because Kara is excited, Kara is thrilled, Kara wants to know what’s next.

There can’t be a _next_.

Saving the plane was dangerous, a reveal that can’t be taken back. There are threats out there that Kara doesn’t know about, can’t know about—Fort Rozz is a lingering specter at the back of Alex’s mind, a million ton weight on her shoulders—and saving Alex is not a good enough reason to expose herself to them.

Kara’s kicked puppy look is back, full force, and Alex hates herself for it. Hates herself more than she usually does. More than she does after she’s just finished touching herself and picturing Kara’s face and moaning Kara’s name, even. Kara looks at her with hurt in those beautiful blue eyes, and Alex considers throwing herself off a high-rise so she doesn’t have to remember being the cause of it.

OooO

Hank—Director Henshaw—gives the order to have Supergirl taken in, and Alex nearly swallows her own tongue biting back her objections. Henshaw is her boss, but Kara is her _everything_. He adds that it’s for questioning, not containment, and Alex remembers how to breathe, if only just barely.

His promise to Jeremiah had covered _both_ his girls, hadn’t it? Hank hated to break promises.

OooO

Alex watches Kara, pelted with kryptonite darts, fall from the sky, heart in her throat. She knows, logically, that Kara is nigh but indestructible, that even with the kryptonite radiation poisoning her, Kara will bounce back to better than human with but a few hours of removal from the substance, but logic has no bearing on her in that moment.

All she sees is Kara—Kara, her foster sister, Kara who she has tried and failed not to love the way she does, _Kara_ —falling from height that could and would kill anyone else. Kara hits a car before the ground, and the sound of metal and glass crumpling, breaking, shattering, makes Alex think of bones, think of Kara’s bones, and what if the kryptonite is too strong? What if Kara is hurt by the impact more than Alex’s projections? She’d done the math, the work, had been the one to design the darts they’d shot into Kara, but what if she was wrong? What if this yet another failure Alex has perpetrated, the kind she can’t apologize for, the kind that can’t be forgiven? A failure she can’t take back.

What if she’s just killed Kara?

OooO

Kara wakes up, scared and confused, and Hank almost doesn’t sound like Hank in those first few moments after Kara’s awakening. He doesn’t sound like the man who’d seen her at her worst—second-to-worst, nothing was ever going to be worse than the moment she’d lost control of herself and came screaming Kara’s name while Kara was listening on the other end of the line having just come herself—or like the stern but kind Director Alex trusted with her life.

Alex lets Kara out of the cuffs without hesitation. “She doesn’t need those.”

But Kara jerks her hand away from Alex like she’s just been burned, like Alex is _worse_ than the kryptonite washing her sunshine face pale and wane and faintly sick. The blatant betrayal in her eyes makes Alex feel like she’s swallowed something sharp and explosive and toxic. She never, ever wants Kara to look like that again, certainly not at her.

They let Kara out of observation, show her around, give explanations. The details Hank and Alex have don’t seem satisfactory to Kara, she isn’t happy with all this new information—the reveal of all the lies Alex has been telling her for years—and, for once, there’s nothing Alex can do to make it better.

Hank tells Kara about Fort Rozz, about her inadvertent release of humanity’s worst nightmares amongst them. Kara isn’t cowed, she’s angered. She wants to help, but Hank won’t let her, and Alex won’t go against orders. She would, to _protect_ Kara, but not to vindicate her, not yet.

Kara lashes out, and Alex hears her, acknowledges her. There’s no small measure of truth in what she’s saying. Kara is a big part of Alex’s recruitment to the DEO—as is Hank’s promise—but if she wasn’t able to hack it, if she couldn’t be want the organization needed, Alex has no illusions that she wouldn’t be searching for a mid-level researcher position somewhere.

This is actually hers, and she earned it, despite disappointing her mother with the illusion of it, despite disappointing Kara with the reality of it. This is hers, and it’s not wrong to be proud of her standing within it, no matter how Kara is saddened by what Alex does for a living.

Still, Alex wishes this was easier. That Kara wouldn’t have to be directly involved, that she could stop lying to the most important person in her life, without _this_ being the fallout.

But Kara is storming off, and Hank is reminding her that Kara is _dangerous_. And Kara could be, if she hadn’t been raised as such nobility as to ignore the people beneath her—and humans are so very far beneath her—and hadn’t grown up with Danvers teaching her that while humanity is flawed it’s still valuable. Life, _all_ life, is valuable.

Hank doesn’t know Kara the way Alex does. And Kara _could_ be dangerous, but she _won’t_ be. All Kara has ever wanted was to help, to be someone others could depend on.

But Alex bites her tongue and swallows back her words. Because Hank is her boss—he’d promised to look after her, to look after Kara, but he’d never sworn to make their dreams come true—and she cannot openly defy him. There is more at play in the field than whether or not an extraterrestrial can be trusted to help rather than harm, though that is the focus of the DEO, and there are plans already in motion that no one on Earth can stop, no matter how committed to the cause.

And Kara is out there, feeling hurt, feeling betrayed, and there’s nothing Alex can do to assuage those feelings.

It’s a bitter pill to swallow, made only the slightest bit better by the half bottle of Jack she swallows down after her shift.

OooO

Alex swoops in to save Kara, because that’s always been her job. Long before the DEO and paramilitary maneuvers, Alex had been jumping with angry fists and righteous vengeance for the fuckwads who thought that Kara’s unwillingness to fight back equaled an easy target.

She orders a pursuit as easily as breathing, accustomed to the hectic routine of alien attacks and the DEO’s swift but too often too late interference. But it doesn’t really register, not with Kara there. Not with Kara looking scared, not with Kara _bleeding_.

“It’s okay. I gotcha, I gotcha.” Alex hastens to reassure, the hostile alien far from mind as she tends to the single-most important person in her life.

Kara, of course, heals before Alex can even finish stitching up the wound, but even that is an empty comfort. Because Kara had _needed_ stitching, no matter how temporary the wound, and that is the farthest thing from acceptable in Alex’s eyes.

Hank is caustic, as is his way, and Alex watches as Kara wilts under his skepticism and her own uncertainty, and Alex aches for her alien, who isn’t actually hers. And Alex has to admit that she knew more about who Kara’s mother was than Kara did. Alex cringes inside, having to reveal that Kara’s mother wasn’t just the honorable and noble Lady of House El that Kara knew her to be, having to reveal that most of the alien problems Earth’s currently facing have to do with the fact that Alura had banished them to a prison beyond time and now they were here and eager for vengeance.

Alex wants to die when Kara sounds so sad, so dejected, when she says “The world doesn’t need me.” And walks out of the DEO with the barest hint of tears in her eyes that Alex only sees because Alex so accustomed—too accustomed—to watching for any sign of discontent in her foster sister.

And then Alex finds herself standing outside Kara’s locked apartment—she has a key, but there’s an implied trust that she will not break by entering when she knows Kara is home but won’t let her in—spilling her heart about their familial relationship, if not the relationship that Alex—and Alex alone—feels boiling just beneath the surface.

So Alex gives Kara the last bit of Krypton—of home—that she can. She holds Kara’s hand—too used to the pain of her too-tight grip to flinch, to let it show—as Alura shines before Kara for the first time since Krypton exploded and left Kara alone in the universe.

She has a cousin, sure, but where the fuck has he been for the last twelve years? Alex doesn’t know and doesn’t _care_. He left Kara with the Danvers with hardly a word and Alex knows that his communications with Kara have been few and far between ever since.

Kara has always been the last true survivor of her entire world. The least Alex can do is give her back this one, small thing. Even if she knows it won’t ever really be enough.

OooO

They storm the DEO, two sisters—they’re _sisters_ , that’s the relationship between them, that’s all they can be—and Hank shoots them down because alien equals bad in the his eyes—but not Kara, Kara is the exception, and they both know it, even if he won’t admit it just yet; a promise made as a plane went down to protect the daughters of a man who wouldn’t live to see them become women—and he tries to deny what’s going to happen and Alex counters with her utter faith.

It works, in the end.

Vartox does his worst. Kara does better. In the end, a dangerous alien escapee from Fort Rozz dies at his own hand, but the implication he leaves renders the victory almost hollow. There is something more, something bigger yet to come.

OooO

Alex holds steady through Hank’s rigorous testing of “Supergirl”’s abilities. Staunches her pride when Kara comes through every exercise ready for more, can’t keep the pride out of her voice when “My sister just broke the sound barrier”.

Kara rushes off, so happy and so eager. More than willing to be a hero, almost desperate for it. Alex can understand that. She’s labored for years under the expectations that she meet a superhuman level of success—protect Kara without giving anything away, be the best but not quite as good as her foster sister from beyond the stars, be more than human to take care of the alien begging sanctuary in their home—she _knows_ how Kara is struggling to live up to an image not of her own making.

OooO

It’s a minor disaster, but nothing they can’t come back from. There’s nothing the two of them can’t come back from—Alex’s depraved fantasies and imbalanced emotions aside, that is—and this isn’t the end; it’s merely the beginning.

OooO

Kara talks about James Olsen like she’s never talked about any of the boys or girls she’s dated before. Hell, she talks about James the way she sometimes talks about Cat Grant—before she realizes she’s talking about her _boss_ , and that maybe she shouldn’t ramble like this about her—and Alex is sick inside.

Jimmy Olsen isn’t some random guy from school, some dude from the internet. Jimmy Olsen is Superman’s favorite sidekick—because _Lois_ _Lane_ could never be classified as a _sidekick_ —and Jimmy Olsen knows who, what, Kara is. Jimmy Olsen could be The One for Kara, and it makes Alex sick.

She hates herself for it. She wants her foster sister to be happy. She wants Kara to live a full and happy life, the kind of life neither of them really thought she’d have while she was still hiding part of who she was. But Kara isn’t hiding anymore and, even if she was, she wouldn’t need to hide from Jimmy.

Jimmy knows what it means to be a Kryptonian on Earth. Jimmy has spent years by Clark’s—by Kal-El’s—side. He knows the dichotomy between Super and Human in a way few ever will. Jimmy Olsen has been a part of Superman’s origin story since that first posed photo, and Alex cannot help by wonder—cannot help but despair—if this will become a defining moment of Supergirl’s.

It’s wonderful for Kara and awful for Alex, and she tries to be happy for her. She does. She tries so hard.

She pictures Kara’s smile after a long talk from James after how superhero-ing isn’t quite what Kara had imagined it to be. She remembers the way Kara had sighed and flustered at the mention of the photojournalist’s belief in her.

She remembers how shattered Kara had been when Jimmy—when _James_ —had called Superman in as reinforcement against Reactron.

But they’d worked that out, they’d talked about faith and belief and concern, and they were going to be happy together. Alex could feel it in the way her bones ached and her stomach turned.

It’s only a matter of time.

If Alex hits the bottle a little harder during Kara and James’ will-they-won’t-they sage, well, nobody knows but her.


End file.
